For me it helps that I enjoy perfecting/varying/repeating.
There could be some element of play in math homework. Play is practice that sparks interest. But what is playful math?
“Here’s a character for Pathfinder. Optimize the shit out of it.”
Some of the math learned in high school can be made more fun and playful with applications such as you mentioned, or with contest math designed for high school students. For a few years now I’ve been involved with the CEMC [1] (at my Alma mater) as a grader for the Euclid math contest which I think is quite fun without requiring anything beyond high school math (doesn’t even require calculus).
According to Mentava their program has 5th graders ready for AP math and middle schoolers ready for college computer science.
20 minutes a day.
It’s just another language. A lot of people see it as esoteric wizardry; the debbil in der math, Bobby!
One plus one
1+1
Same thing, less parchment, less writing stick needed. It’s data compression for an era where Walmart didn’t exist
But not in the way teachers/professors teach it. Quite the contrary
I also studied maths as my major (Algebra, to be more precise). Math is infinitely playful. Trying to weasel your way into a hard problem using various results is fun. (Especially if you don't have a fixed deadline that would turn the play into stress.) It is like sitting in an alien workshop and trying very exotic tools that fit other hands.
If you are more of a visual guy, play around with stuff such as fractals. There, you can visualize the intricate structure on your screen. I will never forget the moment when I saw the Mandelbrot set for the first time. Neither probably did Mandelbrot himself; according to the lore, he expected nothing like that and thought that the computer had an error.
It’s like going after a runner’s high though. It takes work to reach that point where you make connections and feel that neurotransmitter rush.